"Final Fantasy Strategy" development insider: racking your brains to reach 60 frames

　　Recently, members of the original development team of "Final Fantasy Strategy Edition" revealed many interesting stories in an interview with the media - it was the technical limitations of PS consoles that shaped this classic, and the developers' persistence in some core elements also made its unique charm.

Artistic Director Yushi Kazukawa admitted that he had an almost paranoid pursuit of achieving 60 frames at that time. At that time, Square was developing a number of works in parallel, among which the silky 60-frame performance of "Planet Fighting" left a deep impression on him, so he was determined to achieve equal fluency in "Final Fantasy Strategy". The development team thus started "reverse engineering" and racked their brains to break through the limitations of PS functionality.

　　These efforts have profoundly affected the game's visual and gameplay design: for example, to reduce polygon consumption, all modeling try to avoid curves; this is also the significant reduction in the battle scale compared to the spiritual predecessor "The Knights of the Royal Family". Yushi Naikawa said: "Initially we wanted to maintain the map size and number of characters in "The Knights", but the frame rate would drop to 30 frames anyway." The final team's number was reduced from 10 to 5.

Director Yasuki Matsuno pointed out that this seemingly compromised change actually fits the original intention of the development team to make tactical games more acceptable to RPG players: "The ten-player team is too heavy for novices. At that time, the main team of "Final Fantasy" was mostly 4-5 people, and this setting happened to be perfectly consistent with Kazukawa's frame rate requirements." Technical limitations even gave birth to the game's iconic "Singing Time" (CT) system - the development team cleverly transformed the read delay of advanced magic summons into a featured mechanism. Matsuno stressed: "This is a work born under specific hardware conditions, and even if it is replicated, it will never be able to recreate its essence."

　　"Final Fantasy Strategy Edition: Chronicles of Ivalis will be available on Steam, PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch/Switch2 platforms on September 30.